FOX, of course, focuses on Hunter Biden, because, you know, even though Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn’t admit it, or even pretend to, Hunter bin Biden is a much worse and more dangerous person than the Tea Party vote fraudster Mark Meadows who was promoted to replace South Carolina Tea Party star, Office of Budget Management director and chief of staff Ambassador Mick Mulvaney as Trump’s final White House body man and gunsel, and made a few small mistakes like anyone could have.
A certain type of friend believes that it is always right to lie, if your friend needs you to lie. To such friends, a friend who won’t lie for a friend is no better than a fucking rat. And a judgmental fucking hypocrite rat, at that.
Back a decade or two, an elected official being caught in a lie was a shameful thing that often damaged or even ended a political career. Today public lying is interpreted transactionally, how much damage will this particular lie do to the liar in the polls, how much trouble will it make with the powers that be? One former president, pressed by an all-powerful Independent Counsel and sweated by ambitious partisans like young Boof Kavanaugh, was even impeached for lying under oath trying to cover up personal sexual misdeeds. “The US can’t have a president who is a liar!” was the pious sentiment of the elected moralists who drew up articles of impeachment against him.
Being caught in a lie was a fairly serious impediment to political ambition at one time. There was, at the very least, a steep price to pay for being caught in a lie. Clinton was publicly humiliated, graphic details of his sexual kinks were put on the internet by the Independent Counsel, he lost his law license, paid some big fines. Until a new ethic took hold in our national politics: there is nothing wrong with lying if you are a good person only lying to protect friends and to fight evil! It is the logical extension of the old Libertarian battle cry of 1964 “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”.
The extreme moral relativism of this transactional defense of the right to lie to protect friends, or profits, or a higher truth, or whatever the lie is intended to do, is in some ways like the oath of Omerta that made men in the Mafia must take. No matter what, I will not rat on anyone in my family. I prefer death to the dishonor of incriminating an associate. The current over-the-top cast of quid pro quo/transactional liars and obstructionists, clearly prefer a pardon from their co-conspirator to death, and as for dishonor, that’s a game for chumps and losers only. Anyone stupid enough to admit anything, no matter how strong the proof of the case against them, well, fuck them.
With unlimited lies now being permissible, to defend decency, to cover up embarrassing or incriminating evidence or, sometimes, even to glorify Jesus Christ Himself, there is no reason not to lie. What you don’t admit can rarely be used against you in court. Dubya Bush’s Attorney General, Antonio Gonzalez, when pressed by a subcommittee on suspicious details of the sudden mass firing of DOJ officials, claimed over and over not to recall anything about the purge he had supervised. As Jon Stewart pointed out at the time, Gonzalez preferred being seen as a pinhead who could not remember anything at all to saying anything that might be politically impolitic, or used to get to the sordid truth of the politically motivated firings at DOJ.
Within twenty years politically motivated purges of public officials seen as insufficiently loyal to the president, and the routine firing of agency investigators, or any other appointed public official who spoke words offensive to the thin-skinned Unitary Executive, became the norm in one party. Today it is smart to lie, until the authorities are actually able to lock you up after proving to a jury that you lied to conceal crimes.
Democrats and Republicans both lie, of course. Only one party has made belief in an outlandish lie, in a series of aggravating fictions, articles of faith. Expressing loyalty to this ridiculous lie (down ticket Republicans all won fair and square, only Trump, at the top of that same ballot, was cheated, nationwide) is a prerequisite for receiving Republican campaign money and a party endorsement. If the leader constantly lies, and his lackeys all have to indignantly back him up with lies of their own or get publicly fired and humiliated, here’s what you get (this is from an excellent March 2021 podcast):
Notice that Trump’s post-election lie about massive mail-in voting fraud in 2020 goes back to his paranoid fantasy about how he was fraudulently denied the full measure of his historic landslide victory in his 2016 election and then spent four years in hell over it. In hell! SO UNFAIR! It was so unfair that even Bill Barr, America’s Hermann Goering, felt obliged to investigate, breaking 150 years of DOJ precedent, so he could tell the president that the massive mail-in voting fraud they had both publicly predicted in the lead up to the election was bullshit, that there was no evidence for it, that the infinitesimal amount of fraud found would not change any result anywhere.
Fuck Barr. On to Plan B, Sidney Powell, My Pillow Guy, Flynn, Rudy, DOJ stooge Jeff Clarke, Cruz, Hawley, Brooks, Jordan, Biggs, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar and company, bring on Bannon and Kerick, let Cruz start John Eastman’s Green Bay Sweep, baby! We got the troops ready to activate, inside and outside the Capitol, with tactical support from FOX, Newsmax and OANN, to snatch victory from the jaws of massive organized bipartisan pedophile fraud! Jews will not replace us, yo!
Supporting their girl Marjorie Taylor Greene before her hearing today, her fellow travelers in the House issued this statement:
“The left’s attempts to politicize the courts to achieve what they cannot at the ballot box puts America on a dangerous path.”
NICE!
Today there was sworn testimony in a lawsuit brought on behalf of Georgia voters contesting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s right to be on the ballot, as someone who took an oath to defend the Constitution and who then advocated loudly for extra-constitutional remedies to an election she claimed was stolen. The case was brought under section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The hearing was live streamed to anybody interested in hearing it in real time. I heard about an hour of Marjorie and then the closing arguments of both lawyers. Here are some new things I learned from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s testimony today.
She seems to have a fairly spotty memory for someone her age. She didn’t recall making any of the strong statements she made about the need to stop the peaceful transfer of power. When her own words were played on video she said they were taken out of context, but didn’t elaborate except to call CNN a lying outfit. She swore she had no recollection about people she talked to before or after January 6th because she was very busy running her new Congressional office. Her recollection is particularly poor when it comes to specific contacts of her’s who were arrested for the violent assault on the Capitol.
She says she really has little control over what appears on her Facebook page, or on her Twitter feed. She said she has many staffers and does not directly authorize the videos, even ones that have been on her facebook page for a year-and-a-half, prove good for fundraising (Biden stole Trump’s presidency and the radical left thinks we’re idiots) and are never taken down.
Marjorie believes that socialist liberals are out to portray her as stupid, her followers as not smart people. But she insists her supporters are smart enough to know that when she encourages them to show up in numbers on January 6th to flood the Capitol because it’s a 1776 moment, or that Pelosi and others might need to be executed, and we need you all there to help us right this evil injustice of a stolen election, that she is only referring to a peaceful lawful march to the Capitol to keep the pressure on fainthearted Republicans to legally overturn a stolen election. In other words, free speech. Plus, after the riot was stopped she immediately urged everyone to be peaceful and to obey the law.
I may have missed it, but when she spoke of a planned peaceful march to the Capitol, I thought the lawyer questioning her should have asked her if she was aware that the organizers of the January 6th Stop the Steal protest rally had not sought a permit for any kind of march that day. Why involve all those extra police and spend all that extra money when you can all just march down there as a bunch of individual free citizens and go into the people’s house which you already own and don’t need an invitation to, or permission to enter, even when its closed for a joint session of Congress?
And besides words like “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore”, or her “we can’t allow the peaceful transfer of power Joe Biden wants” are obviously metaphors meaning be peaceful, don’t insult the police, don’t hit them, gouge their eyes out or spray mace at them, if they tell you the building’s closed obey their lawful orders, and all like that.
And, of course, when she said that Nancy Pelosi had committed treason and that treason was punishable by death, she was a private citizen, in 2019, come on, she was just a regular person trying to get elected to Congress. In other words, she hadn’t taken the oath of office yet, the oath to defend the Constitution, so like are you going to go all the way back to when I was in high school looking for things I said that you can use to crucify me? (her lawyer interjected that bit about going all the way back to high school for compromising comments she made a year or two before the riot) [1].
And what we learned most of all is that she, like Boof Kavanaugh and her party’s raging leader, is the victim of a dark money-funded nefarious witch-hunt campaign, by cannibal pedophiles, no doubt, to bring shame to the people who voted her into office as their duly elected representative. (in the very election that was rigged against Trump!)
In summary, she is merely the victim of enraged, insane partisans trying to stop democracy by taking her off the ballot on some weird and farfetched old legal theory about not helping and encouraging, aiding and comforting, people who want to violently overturn a corrupt and evil election and stop them from “peacefully” putting a monster in the White House.
Her lawyer’s closing focused on the need to look only at the peaceful, lawful rally at the Ellipse that preceded the riot, something that was 100% protected by the Constitution, to wit, the First Amendment rights to free expression and to peacefully assemble, and that it’s not fair to punish someone merely for supposedly aiding and abetting a riot she later tweeted, once it was underway, should be done lawfully and peacefully. In fact, he took pains to read “or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” right out of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Once the briefs are filed next week and the judge has a chance to weigh all the evidence and arguments, this could be a very interesting and helpful case going forward. Brad Raffensberger will then have to weigh the administrative law judge’s decision against his own political future and the number of death threats he recieves before likely leaving Marjorie on the ballot. I found it fascinating to watch how outwardly calmly Marjorie conducted herself during most of the part I saw, Like others before her she preferred to come off as a pinhead with the memory of a housefly rather than truthfully answer almost any question under oath. Her composure was particularly surprising after some of the overheated rants she made on right-wing media in the days leading up to her forced sworn testimony in a baseless case launched, no doubt, by moneyed Jewish space laser wielders and four black elected women she denounced by name in recent “out of context” rants.
[1] from the commies at Business Insider:
“She’s a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason,” Greene said of Pelosi in a 2019 Facebook video, according to CNN. “She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.”
When former President Donald Trump told an angry mob that had burst into the Capitol that Mike Pence had betrayed them, it was not the first time in American history that a US president advocated hanging his own vice president. Perhaps there was no irony involved in the fact that the other president was the largely ignorant Trump’s favorite president, noted man of violent temper Andrew Jackson.
Unlike Trump, who with perfect deniability (his intent is still being debated by great legal minds) merely noted that his vice president was a traitorous coward and incited an angry mob to make good on their threat to hang him, Old Hickory announced that he was ready to go down to South Carolina and personally hang his seditious vice president. You can’t make this shit up.
John C. Calhoun, employing an early version of the now new again Independent State Legislature Doctrine, secretly authored South Carolina’s refusal to obey a federal law under a States’ Rights argument. He argued, arguably seditiously, that a state need not follow a federal law that it found repugnant to its traditions or offensive to its own interests, in this case the harm it would do to slaveholders to obey this federal tariff against Great Britain. South Carolina announced, almost thirty years before taking up arms against the US in the “War of Northern Aggression,” that it was officially nullifying this odious federal law in South Carolina. Predictably, Jackson was furious and ready to go down to South Carolina and personally hang John C. Calhoun.
It wasn’t that they disagreed about slavery, Andrew Jackson a self-made man of the people, had risen from modest circumstances, made his fortune in the slave trade. Jackson was not a man who took kindly to being undermined by his second-in-command, which is not hard to relate to, really.
Read all about the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33, in the online Britannica encyclopedia: https://www.britannica.com/topic/nullification-crisis
In the tit for tat, kick ’em hard, anywhere you can get a boot on ’em, marketing-driven world that is American politics, the advertising hungry corporate media still plays along, faithful as a terrier to the idea that fairness means presenting both sides of everything as having a more or less equal argument. It plays beautifully into a prevalent technique, persuasive to masses who already believe, hammered eternally by one side that is actively much worse than the other: whataboutism.
On one side, you have a long, well-funded multifarious plot culminating in a Hail Mary riot to stop the certification of Trump’s loss in Congress, after a “stolen election”. You have the wife of a staunchly conservative Supreme Court justice urging the outgoing president’s chief of staff to take action, in the name of Jesus Christ and all that is holy, to overturn the election results to keep Trump in office, somehow. We’ve read Donald Trump Jr’s seditious texts, starting a couple of days after the election his father was about to officially lose, about keeping his father in power no matter what, using the leverage of his massive government power. You have pinhead real estate fortune heir Jared Kushner, months after leaving his appointment as Trump’s minister with a dozen portfolios (Covid, peace in the Middle East, ending the Opioid epidemic, rooting out government corruption, making business deals with wealthy sheiks. etc.) getting two billion dollars from the murderer of a journalist, Muhammad bin Salman, a close friend of his he met as his father-in-law’s informal Saudi envoy.
On the other side, you have a shady character named Hunter Biden, son of the current president, and some shady consulting deals he made for large amounts of money. When Giuliani was making wild, unfounded claims about fraud that wasn’t actually fraud, your Honor, and lunatics like Sidney Powell were threatening to release a Kraken she later claimed (as defendant in a defamation case) no reasonable person could have believed existed, one GOP talking point that was out there, after Trump failed to get Ukrainian president Zelensky to announce a fake investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption, was that Hunter Biden forgot a laptop at a repair shop that was loaded with incriminating details (including, of course, the now ubiquitous Republican charge of sexual deviance) about him and his criminal father, Trump’s 2020 opponent in the presidential election. Giuliani announced on FOX that, along with proof of a stolen election, he had the incriminating laptop, or knew someone who had it, or had seen it, or heard about it. Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post pushed the theoretically devastating Hunter Biden story too, the story was Murdoch’s exclusive, claiming they had the laptop, or had seen it, or knew somebody who claimed to have seen it and did a thorough unbiased forensic study of its highly incriminating (for Joe Biden) contents.
What has been the Republican party’s corporate media-abetted answer to the many serious allegations against their top officials, the trove of devastating new evidence we see every other day, the proof of multiple crimes committed in the name of party loyalty? The loud, childish but effective (with corporate media dutifully playing along) GOP response to the mounting evidence that many of them participated eagerly in Trump’s mad plan to stay in power was “what about fucking Hunter fucking Laptop fucking Biden?!! What are the Democrats hiding and why?”
As stories about the insurrection culminating in the January 6, 2021 Trump riot at the Capitol (and continuing energetically since) continue to come out, as damning details create an increasingly gigantic mountain of evidence of a frenzied, sometimes insane, many-pronged plan, involving many prominent elected Republicans, to keep the losing candidate in power, the NY Times and the Washington Post both ran front page stories asking why Democrats had not believed or seriously investigated the sketchy Hunter Biden laptop story. Serious journalism, 2022, Tucker Carlson style — why did Democrats not seriously investigate this implausible story about a cunning criminal, son of their president, too stupid to cover his tracks? Just asking…
Read this post mortem from the Washington Post and see what you can make of this obvious horseshit story about a seeming scumbag who has, significantly for any intelligent analysis of this instance of Whataboutism, never worked in the US government, not for his father or anybody else. Thank God, say Republicans under their collective breath, that intelligent analysis is no longer even a thing when it comes to US politics!
Now warning about Hunter Biden laptop disinfo: guy who leaked it.
Jennifer Rubin, in today’s Washington Post, with an excellent analysis of corporate media’s yawning attitude toward a radicalized political party intent on taking power by any means necessary. Mass media treats GOP elected officials who refuse — seventeen months and counting — to concede their man Donald Trump lost a fair election in 2020, including those who plotted to “legally” overturn that election, as ordinary politicians.
There is nothing ordinary about pretending a last ditch riot intended to seize power never happened, about a far-reaching, well-funded, months’ long, coordinated plan to overturn a free and fair election, nothing ordinary about a party that insists it never lost literally hundreds of court cases (most before the election, trying to limit the “illegitimate” vote) on the merits, simply because they could not prove allegations of fraud they still insist, citing alternative facts, they have massive evidence of.
Nothing ordinary about a party that insists that what you are seeing, reading, watching has nothing whatsoever to do with what millions of faith-based Americans honestly believe about the other party and their most famous supporters (hi, Tom Hanks) sodomizing babies and drinking their blood.
Here’s Jennifer Rubin, preaching to the choir that includes about 60% of us, in a thoughtful word to the mass media called The media still haven’t learned how to cover the GOP threat to democracy.
And Mexico paid for it
gratuitousblahg 